This specification relates to network interface devices.
The physical layer of conventional network protocol stacks include components that serialize and deserialize bit streams, scramble and descramble data, and perform synchronization to align the data to word boundaries.
For example, the IEEE 802.3 Ethernet standard defines a Physical Medium Attachment (PMA) layer and a Physical Coding Sublayer (PCS). These two layers lie between the communication medium at the lowest level and the Gigabit Media Independent Interface (GMII) or extended GMII (XGMII) layers.
The PMA layer receives a serialized bit stream, recovers the clock, and deserializes the data. The PCS layer descrambles the data and performs synchronization to determine the word boundaries of the data.